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The Jewish Chronicle and some blogs, including the usually very savvy Normblog, have been running the story of Israel boycott leader Omar Barghout's hypocrisy as if it was news that he'd enrolled as a PhD student at Tel-Aviv University, and had done so recently.

I posted about Barghouti's PhD enrolment back in March 2006, when I showed he was closely linked to the magazine Dance Europe's decision to ban reviews of an Israeli dance company as part of the pro-Palestinian cultural boycott of all Israel academics and cultural events.

It showed that he was listing his ongoing PhD studies at Tel-Aviv University way back then. Yes, in 2002.

Now, I'm a never-completed-my-PhD veteran myself. But seven years .... well, it's certainly a bit late in the day to be reporting his enrolment as news.

Barghouti is one of the leaders of the present Fatah Palestinian faction-led boycott movement, started in 2004, when he was already at least two years into his PhD studies. Whilst it calls for a complete boycott of all Israeli academic institutions, except for the purpose of meetings to campaign against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, Barghouti ignores the boycott when it comes to his own self-improvement.

Tel-Aviv University has commendably shown its own opposition to boycotts and sanctions by refusing to eject Barghouti because of his political stance, even though that stance is designed to damage the University and Israeli academia in general. But are they up to the academic mark in allowing a PhD student to stay on the roll quite so long without delivering?

You can see Barghouti in full flow in the clip above, delivering standard Fatah Stalinist-style denunciations of Israeli "genocide", "apartheid" etc in the smoothest and coolest of tones.

There are so many ironies here that it's difficult to pick out which to focus on.

The richest is perhaps Barghouti calling in the clip in late 2008 for "an end to lip service" on the importance of the EU taking boycott measures against Israel, whilst now stating that it's "a personal matter" that he's continuing his seven years of PhD studies at Tel-Aviv University and refusing to discuss that any further.

Sheikh Hassan al-Jouju, head of Gaza's Sharia courts, said that the Palestinians reject with disgust the use of Jerusalem's name as part of "this lawless festival".

"Jerusalem is sacred and pure, and its status is derived from what Allah has given to it, and it does not need this nonsense. It needs courageous national standings which will thwart the Judaization schemes and the digging under the al-Aqsa Mosque."

He went on to ask, "Why didn't we hear the voice of the mufti and the head of the Sharia courts in the West Bank in light of these actions?

,,,,those who approved this event, who let these groups dance on the wounds of our people, on our suffering and the cries of pain of the al-Aqsa Mosque, those who approved this event are not Palestinians.

Senior Hamasmember Hamed Bitawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said that "this festival contradicts Islamic law. The Palestinian nation is a nation of jihad and resistance, and this festival damages its image and the memory of the martyrs and their blood. Shame will follow those who approved these cheap festivals."

So it seems the regime in Gaza are firm in their dedication to boycott not just the leader of the supposedly national Palestinian boycott-Israel campaign, but the very cultural activities he and the Palestinian Authority are so keen to promote.

I suspect that they're also less than impressed by his seven year continuing PhD study marathon at Tel-Aviv University.

The Students' Union at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), one of the UK's highest ranked university centres for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has voted to demand the cancellation of a lecture series organised to mark the centenary of Tel-Aviv.

The series has been organized by SOAS' Professor Colin Shindler, the UK's first professor of Israeli Studies, who has also been a friend of mine for over twenty years.

The students of SOAS include a very large number of from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries and others who are passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause. But SOAS during most of the recent history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has also been a place where those students and those from its Hebrew and Israeli Studies centre attend lectures on the Middle East conflict and the history and culture of zionism and discuss the issues in a spirit of scholarship and free enquiry.

Ironically, the Students' Union website carries a constitution proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its absolute commitment to opposing discrimination. That was voted in in 2006, after a previous history of attempts by some student groups to intimidate Jewish students in the name of anti-zionism. Throughout that history, the SOAS directorate firmly opposed such action and subsequently adopted a "Freedom of Expression" code which all who are members of the School are expected to sign up to.

But this latest action has been taken by the Students' Union in the name of boycotting Israeli academics in response to the current Gaza conflict, because they are amongst those who have been invited to lecture in Colin Shindler's Tel-Aviv centenary series.

Here's an even greater irony. The series started last term (and resumed for the current term on Monday night, despite the Student Union banning vote). Amongst the speakers were the Palestinian Authority ambassador, who was formerly a well-respected academic at Bethlehem University, as well as an anti-zionist Israeli academic.

Here's Colin Shindler's statement, issued before the vote was taken, demonstrating his impeccably and consistently sustained record of peace activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Our lecture series
‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of
lectures that we organise around a theme each year.

Professor Joachim
Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his
academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador,
Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on
‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an
anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic
literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to
speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and
music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of
Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.

It is therefore
terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided
with the terrible events in Gaza.

Any call for
cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the
centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the
attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of
their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British
government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.

Academic institutions
rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos
is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On
a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a
minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.

I have never called
for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not
to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a
recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.

In the ten years that
I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of
their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.

I hope that colleagues
will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine
conflict they do not agree with.

These are difficult
times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share
my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases
this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.

Last night, I was at SOAS to hear presentations by Colin Shindler and Dr Emmanuele Ottolenghi on Israel and the Gaza War. The lecture theatre was packed. The presentations were excellent. The post presentation questions and discussions were courteous and attentively listened to. Amongst the SOAS student respondees at the end was a woman in Islamic dress who said she deplored the Student Union vote, and strongly supported free speech. And there was also the ardent pro-Palestinian activist who demanded to know why the Palestinian perspective had not been included. But then, as Colin Shindler pointed out, this was a special event presentation on Israel and the Gaza War. And the activist had spoken as if there was one single Palestinian perspective, although the presentations had discussed the ample evidence of the strongly divergent politics of different Palestinian parties, particularly Fatah and Hamas.

Clearly, the issue is not just about attempting to ban Israeli academics, though that's appalling enough. It's a clear cut attempt to boycott any public academic presentation about Israel, however unrelated to the Gaza conflict, or even the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's also about an attempt to impose a one-story Palestinian account, despite the academic evidence of a divergent, complex politics amongst Palestinians and their allies.

So much for the SOAS Students' Union. Sources at SOAS also tell me that Colin Shindler has been put under a great deal of pressure to cancel the series by leaders of the SOAS branch of UCU, the academic staff union, of which he is a member. Will SOAS UCU now act in favour of or against free speech?

My mother may have severe dementia, but she still knows who Diana was. And this bit of 1981 royal wedding kitsch sits by her bed

It's wonderful to be able to blog from my iphone while sitting in first a cab then a car repair centre in Willesden.
The downside is that the very pretty Typepad iPhone app doesn't seem to have a "save post" option.

It's publish or nothing.

So I'll have to publish as is when they bring my car round and demystify you as to what I'm on about later.

Clue: It's about an unexpected side of the normally ultra-rationalist male bloggers who include founders and leading signatories of the Euston Manifesto.

Desert Island Discs is one of my favourite BBC Radio 4 programmes. Like an awful lot of the Radio 4 schedule, it's been there for ever. Like over sixty years. There's a story that Herbert Morrison, 1940s Labour cabinet minister and leader of the old London County Council so longed to be chosen to appear on it that he used to carry around a list of the eight records he'd selected, just in case he got the call. He never did.

Well, yes, I'd love to be on Desert Island Discs, and I think I could put together an interesting eight track playlist. But I haven't got a pre-selected list I carry around with me. If I wanted to, I could do a Desert Island Discs blog post anyway. It would mean that I'd never get invited, but that's the way it is, anyway. With an iphone with over 900 tracks on it, the whole concept looks a bit absurd.

Then of course, the real reason is the vanity one, the lure of being selected.

So I'll readily own up to my own vanity and say how pleased and flattered I am to have been asked by Norm to be the subject of a normblog profile. Blogging royalty. In a pantheon which includes international star bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Omar of Iraq the Model and Michele Malkin. And a great many of my own favourites. The thing is, Norm's now up to number 252 . OK, he doesn't do them in rank order, as far as I know, but maybe he's down to scraping the barrel?

So Norm sends me this proforma to fill in for the profile. Consternation. There are fifty questions to answer, and I have to choose just thirty. As you'll see from my archive, I tend never to use one sentence where fourteen will do, so how am I going to work out which ones I can bear to leave out?

Would I prefer to tell the world which political or philosphical thesis I think it more important to promote, or would it be better to reveal what I'd do with a huge amount of money if it came my way? Believe me, the choices weren't easy.

And then, I really like putting links into my posts. It's a sort of extreme pedantry. There are no links in normblog profiles, yet here I was going to identify so many ideas and references to things I'd really like to share with people. I emailed Norm. Could I just put links in? No. But if I supplied the links separately from the draft, he'd try put them in for me. When I sent him my draft, there was a list of about fifty links. Norm's tone was slightly pained, but tolerant. There were an awful lot of links; normblog profiles don't usually have links, and would I mind if he made decisions about which if any to put in? No, of course I'd be happy to leave it to him.

So that's what he's done, being a very excellent mensch, as well as an ace blogger.

Thanks, Norm. And thanks for unwittingly giving me the idea of doing a post in which I include the answers to the rest of the fifty questions that didn't go into the profile, updating it to add a few at a time over the course of the day.

Which is almost certainly more than you want to know. But here's the information if you care to read it.

What has been your worst blogging experience?

Being threatened with being sued by a writer who didn't like what I'd written in relation to a comment she wrote on my blog, and then deluged with emails from her friends and allies who piled on the pressure and some of whom organized various forms of ostracism. I didn't back down, she didn't sue and the whole thing petered out but left me feeling resentful and indignant.

What philosophical thesis
do you think it most important to disseminate?

The idea that groups of ordinary people can organize and achieve enormously beneficial changes, even if they don't belong to a political party. The history of zionism, of the Soviet Jewry campaign, and the various movements that led to the downfall of Soviet Communism are cases that come to mind.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already
passed its best point, or is that yet to come?

The best is definitely yet to come. That's Jewish optimism for you. I think the problems of global warming will be solved, and the forms of terrorism that blight our world today will be eliminated by changes in technology. I realise this is very much a minority opinion.

I'm still thinking about who might be cultural heroes for me. And then I've run out of time for the moment. I'll be back to do some more later today.

Mmmm. I'm prejudiced against pretty much any variant of English blokeishness, especially the shouty outdoor drinking, upperclass braying and football fan types, but ditto for macho cultural wannabees of every nation.

So I'm now thinking about:

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be
Prime Minister (President etc), who would you choose?

Given the present incumbent, tempting to say almost anyone, but it's not quite true. The obvious choice is Tony Blair. I liked Lord Desai's comment that Gordon Brown was put on earth to show how good Tony Blair really was.

What is your favourite
proverb?

Many waters cannot quench love

What, if anything, do you worry about?

Like Imshin said, if you're a Jewish mother, you worry about just about everything. On a personal basis, how to provide for an old age which could well include years of dementia; on my daughter and son in law's behalf, what will they live on, and how will they be able to afford a house; in the wider world, how will we be able to keep the rogue states and terrorist groups from blighting our lives and theirs before we find the technologies that will totter them.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there
anything you'd do differently?

I can think of some people I should have walked right by.

What would you call your autobiography?

Getting the Lightbulb to Want to Change

Who would play you in the movie about your life?

Imshin wrote after she met me that I reminded her of Judy Davis. I don't look like her, but I'm flattered by the comparison, so I'll opt for her.

What is your most treasured possession?

My grandmother's brass candlesticks and my grandmother's silver betrothal spoon, both of which came from Galicia in Poland

What talent would you most like to have?

I'd love to be a brilliant street dancer

Which English Premiership football (soccer) team do you
support (or which baseball and/or basketball team)?

See my comments above on commonly enjoyed activities which I regard as a waste of time.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come
true, what would you wish for?

To be able to give up paid working and devote my energies to all the other things I don't get enough time for

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly
to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money?

Firstly, set up a charitable fund of ten percent of it, and devote a part of my life to using the income anonymously to help individuals and causes I like. Secondly, buy my daughter and son in law a fabulous home and everything needed to make it into whatever kind of place they dream of. Thirdly, use the opportunities to travel to spend time with family and friends across the world, plus attend some fancy workshops run by top people in their trade--like Linda Weinman's Photoshop and Susie Fishbein's cookery workshop. Fourthly, sponsor groups of young Jewish families to get housing near synagogues so they could become long term communities. Finally I think I'd get plastic surgery to do some pin and tuck work on the saggy bits that you get when you're my age.

To this day, the pay of community college lecturers remains the lowest of the full time state teaching unions, below that of primary school teachers.

It had a time honoured tradition of passing motions supporting Cuba, China and whatever far left dictatorship its committee apparatchiks wanted to cosy up to (to say nothing of "fraternal visits".

So I knew that if a merger went through, not only would the new union be signed up to supporting the Stop the War Campaign (which NATFHE housed, provided financial support for, and allowed its General Secretary to campaign for), but similar hard left positions-- including a boycott of Israeli academics, which an array of fringe radical academics from some prestigious universities had failed to get approved within AUT in 2005. I played a part in that one; I was a member of the special delegates' conference that threw out the motion.

However, I never managed to get a broader campaign going; the organized Jewish community outsourced its efforts to getting the Engage group leading a campaign which centred round opposing the AUT boycott while leaving the merger to go ahead. Engage, being itself a soft Trotskyist controlled group, in fact supported the merger, even though the most simple arithmetic and a cursory reading of the constitution of the merged union made it clear that NATFHE majorities and NATFHE style caucusing and manipulation were inevitably going to ensure that a boycott type motion would be agreed.

This is of course the method used by left totalitarian regimes from which UCU, dominated as it is by apparatchiks of the SWP, draws its methods.

It is also seriously misleading to label it simply anti-semitic. There are plenty of loyal Israelis who are not Jews, but who would be outraged by the requirement to denounce their government and agree with UCU’s ritual mantras. There are also some British non-Jewish members of UCU who are made to feel profoundly alienated and threatened by this and other displays of UCU’s intimidationism.

Apart from possible legal action– which may or may not come to pass– one of the most interesting political answers may be to campaign for the adoption of legislation to force unions to ballot members on political actions like these, including a requirement that a majority of the registered membership (not just a majority of those who actually vote in a ballot) must have voted for it.It would stop union gesture politics like this (including UCU’s financial and logistical support of the Stop the War campaign) in their tracks.

Of course, a requirement like that could only be seen to be legitimate if there were also a requirement on all of us to vote in national and local elections. I’ve been thinking about that as an issue for some time. This denouement with UCU (which was absolutely inevitable once AUT and NATFHE merged) has made me feel that the requirement to vote should be seen as one of the requirements of our democracy. After all, the overwhelming majority of people in this country accept that there may be times when we are required to enlist and fight for our country when it is under attack. A requirement to vote is of the same order, and of course it still offers the possibility of spoiling your ballot paper if you don’t like any of the choices on offer.

But opting out of either taking part in choosing the government and policies of your local area and your country, or your union, if you choose to belong to one, shouldn’t be an option.

Another view, which involves abandoning UCU to the Trotskyists of SWP, and then contemplating even abandoning UK academia altogether, is taken by Shalom Lappin in a beautifully argued post here.

My view, though, goes back to the very first post I put up on the subject. It's all about democracy.

Since the story came out of the BBC's "impartiality summit" at which some of its poster boys and girls owned up to their institution's inbuilt bias, quite a few commentators have followed up with astringent critiques.

The BBC's coverage of the government's last minute U-turn away from forcing new faith schools to take 25% of their pupils either from other faiths or none was another example of its bias in action. It was clear enough from news programme after news programme what the inbuilt line was. There were questions like,"Do you really believe faith schools aren't a threat to community cohesion?"

Quite a lot of that was taken up with family business. Like going with my mother to have her heart scanned (I might write a post about the traumas of encountering our glorious National Health Service when the patient is your 89 year old disabled mother who has advanced dementia). Most of the rest has involved me being in touch with various art colleges to set up interviews for my daughter, who's here from Jerusalem for ten days.

It's being widely reported that all faith schools in England are to be required to teach pupils about other faiths than their own.

FAITH schoolsare to be instructed to teach pupils about other religions besides their own.

Leaders from the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist faiths have signed a joint statement backing the teaching of an awareness of the “tenets” of other faiths in schools.

The declaration, made jointly with the Department for Education and Skills, says that religious education enables pupils to “combat prejudice” and helps them to develop respect and sensitivity to others.

The agreement commits faith schools to using the National Framework for Religious Education, drawn up in 2004, which encourages the teaching of the tenets of the five major religions but which is non-statutory.

This agreement may well commit Church of England and Roman Catholic schools, who in any case already teach about other faiths through their exisiting religious education syllabuses.

But in the case of Jewish schools, the signatory was Jon Benjamin, the Director General of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Jon is a tireless and very able chief executive, who has a great deal of experience of working with some of the major Jewish charities, including the British division of ORT, which is active in promoting technology education in Jewish and non-Jewish schools. However, he is not a faith leader. He has no authority of any sort over Jewish schools, because their religious education syllabuses are determined by whichever religious authority is responsible for them. The Board of Deputies is a communal representative organization, akin to a parliament or a regional consultative council, which does not exercise any religious or other authority over Jewish schools.

And I cannot imagine any circumstances in which the dozens of strictly orthodox schools, including the three or four which are state funded would agree to teach other faiths to their pupils.

There must have been some round here, but by the time I surfaced, there were just dustings of white on the lawn.

But it was the stories of the queues of thousands of motorists lining up to crowd into the shopping malls at Brent Cross, Bluewater and just about everywhere else for the sales that made me decide to stay home instead of going out to do the shopping I should have done.

And from the third night of Chanukah in Jerusalem last year, there's this...